Never was the phrase "a job well begun, is a job half done" truer than in the case of memory. All memories begin with what you perceive – with how you see, hear and feel the world. And for that simple reason, the first way to boost your memory is to make sure that you experience the world as vividly, clearly and meaningfully as possible.

To understand how to do this, we need to appreciate that our senses are not designed to record the world, but instead to make sense of it. Where cameras take instantaneous, detailed snapshots of our surroundings, human perception takes time and is full of creativity and imagination. To experience the world in memorable ways, we need to treat perception as an active process of recognising, probing, questioning, comparing, opining and feeling.

Remembering names and faces

Let's see how this works by examining the way we go about remembering names and faces at a party. Often in the bustle of this situation, people will take a brief look at someone's face, half listen to their name, continue trying to follow the conversation, and then – within minutes – have no idea who it was they were speaking to. In certain company, this is recommended; but it can sometimes be nice to remember the person later.

To do that, you'll first want to put lots of life and imagination into the way you experience the person's face. Ask yourself playful questions as you look at them:

• Who do they remind me of?

• What animal does this person most resemble?

• What would their caricature look like?

• If they were a genius, what would their talent be?

• If they were on the run from the police, what crime would they have committed?

• What would they look like if they were of the opposite sex?

It doesn't really matter what the questions are, what's important is that you dig deep into the unique details of the face, discovering its distinctive and memorable character – that's what questioning helps us do.

The most vital thing to realise here is that your experience of the world is changed and enriched by this kind of active, imaginative looking. It gives what you see more depth and character. Perhaps this is what Proust had in mind when he said that we should "leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination". What the world looks like depends a lot on how we look at it.

But if using our imagination is the way to pay deep attention to the details of a face, how does this work with names? They're much simpler than faces, which is good, but they also give us much less to work with. They are often short and meaningless, and although every face is different, names are repeated all the time. We're all going to meet lots of Kates and Kevins in our lives.

One way to tackle the challenge this poses is to behave as if you are really interested in a person's name. This has the useful side-effect of actually making it more interesting.Just as when we smile, we feel happy, so too when we behave like we're fascinated by a name, we become a little fascinated by it. It's an embarrassing but true fact about human beings …

The following behaviours are a great way to literally act out attentive interest in a name:

• Say the name out loud just after learning it. "Hello Tom, nice to meet you. Tom."

• Don't be embarrassed about forgetting (everyone does it). Ask again even if you're not sure you have forgotten. "Was that Derek, you say? Oh no, I'm sorry, Tom."

• Ask for the spelling whenever confused about exactly what the name was: "Tom. Interesting. Is that T-H-O-M? No? With a silent P? No? Just T-O-M, like Tim but with an O. Short for Thomas? Good, great to meet you, Tom."

• Be kind and repeat your own name a couple of times – the person you're chatting with has probably forgotten your name too.

How to keep focus

The art of memory is the art of making things meaningful – and that begins with attention. One of the things we'll see again and again is that it's very difficult to pay attention to things, even if we want to remember them. The trouble is, we're typically so busy bouncing around our own minds that we devote only a meagre portion of our mental resources to the here and now. It's genuinely difficult in our busy, electronic world to pay sustained attention. Half of your mind is always off checking your inbox, worrying about your children, job or personality, or thinking about the thousands of things you intend to do in the future (learn Spanish, get fit, take the quiche out of the oven, and so on). This is, if you think about it, another embarrassing fact about humans: that we hardly notice when our minds are running all over the place.

An excellent method for calming one's mind and bringing it under better control is simply to learn to notice the difference between good and poor attention. Here's a great technique for doing so, adapted from cognitive behavioural therapy …

While listening to a radio talk show, try deliberately turning your attention on and off every other minute. Pay rapt attention to the conversation for one minute, let your mind wander the next. Spend another minute making sure you capture every word, before allowing your mind once again to drift. Carry on in this manner for five or 10 minutes.

If you practise this scheme daily, you'll begin to notice how much the power of your attention can vary: how intense it can feel, and how dispersed. Gradually, you'll become more adept at recognising the distinction and, as a result, get better at deliberately controlling your attention.

Mind gamesMemory miracles

We tend to think of perception as the input of a picture, and memory as the storage of that picture, but it's more complex than that. It's an imaginative process where we actively discover meaning on the basis of prior knowledge. We only really perceive what we know how to perceive.

You may notice this after you learn a new obscure word, and then suddenly start noticing it everywhere, having seemingly never previously heard it. The truth is you've encountered the word before, but it's only now you know it that you're noticing it.

If you completed the memory test, and memorised 20 species of tropical fish, you may have a similar epiphany the next time you peer into a fish tank.

The same thing happens when we learn a foreign language, or 16 different species of pig, for example (go to memrise.com/guardian). Suddenly the world seems a richer place. Your memory is part of how you see the world: the more you learn of it, the more you see in it.